Lightspeed Boosts Three Funds With $4B

Lightspeed Venture Partners secured more than $4 billion across three of its funds in order to support early- and growth-stage entrepreneurs around the world.

The company did not disclose the source of the funding.

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Here is the breakdown of how Menlo Park-based Lightspeed plans to use the new funding:

• Lightspeed Venture Partners XIII LP raised $890 million and will support companies in their earliest stages, including seed, Series A and Series B funding rounds.
• Lightspeed Venture Partners Select IV LP will have $1.83 billion to accelerate existing portfolio companies and identify new investments.
• Lightspeed Opportunity Fund LP, a new fund for the company, will use $1.5 billion to fund breakout companies across Lightspeed’s global territories, such as China, India, Israel, Europe and Southeast Asia.

The multistage venture capital firm focuses on innovations and trends in the enterprise and consumer sectors, and has made nearly 800 investments and helped more than 400 companies since its inception in 2000, according to Crunchbase data. The company said it manages an overall platform of $10.5 billion.

Lightspeed’s most recent investment was in San Francisco-based Tonkean, a software-as-a-service startup offering tools to help companies automate work ranging from escalation of customer support queries to gathering data for internal audits.

In addition to the enterprise and consumer sections, Lightspeed partner Nicole Quinn told Crunchbase News via email that the firm expects new areas of opportunity to emerge.

“Global enterprise and consumer are areas where we have been investing for many years, but we also have much experience in areas such as bio and health sciences,” she said. “For example, our investment in Forty Seven, which was acquired earlier this year. We believe this area will continue to see much innovation, especially as the world rebuilds in the aftermath of these current times.”

Quinn went on to acknowledge that given the current environment with the COVID-19 pandemic, Lightspeed knows “from past experience that the world will persevere, thrive and the innovation cycle will continue,” and that “entrepreneurs will rise to the immense challenge to build the next generation of great companies.”

In addition, the firm plans to continue to support its companies in all times, good or bad, she said.

“Supporting our companies … is paramount to who we are,” Quinn said. “We are acutely aware that COVID-19’s rapid progress has created unexpected challenges for founders and leaders across the greater startup ecosystem and Lightspeed community. As investors and board members, we are spending the lion’s share of our time in support of our global community of founders … to help them think through how their business could be impacted through the rest of the year, and how they and their teams need to respond and start doing things differently to adapt.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias